Don't Look Back...

As you age the past becomes an increasingly seductive place to remember. It's easy to see it as a halcyon time that is less complex than the present. This is especially true in music with the usual trend being that we buy less and listen to a collection established up to our late twenties. For those of us seeking to support the continued availability of music this is a dangerous habit. While the past was of course full of the music that originally inspired you, it is equally full of music we have rejected. However because we have filtered this out and are left with only the music that we now enjoy, it appears that 'all' music was better. It's not to do with the era in which we grew up as it's a function of the ageing process not of musical quality.

It is important to continually look forward, to draw on the inspirations of the past but not be defined by them. Otherwise the music created and promoted is a form of nostalgia rather than being valid in its own right. In folk music we see this all the time, it is possible generally to define most music against a small set of originators. When an artist does appear with a distinctive style such as Kate Rusby, we immediately see many artists copying them.

It's not just about supporting new artists though, it's equally important to support the continued growth of an artist. It must be frustrating that your albums from the 1970s draw the crowds to your concert but your new album gets a polite reception then filed away. Many artists grow in stature with age in the area of folk and blues music. Their accumulated experience and history increases the depth of their performance and lyrical insight. As we have found by distributing the current albums of many artists that have been around for decades, they don't suddenly lost their talent. These artists just need a channel and to find their potential audience. It's a constant focus for us to nurture that relationship of new material by an existing artist with a receptive audience.

At our service we have sought to blend current and past music, allowing the paths between them to be formed by our listeners. We place equal emphasis on contemporary music and champion it with vigor, so that we don't become locked into the past. By creating a line in our minds where the past is good and the current is not, then we are limiting our experience and ultimately creating a situation where the music will not flourish.

In my listening time I limit the amount of time I spend on old music so that I don't become seduced by the past. Great as the past was, we can't live there.

Are you single?

The high street retail music chains are starting to indicate that the ‘CD single’ as a medium is no longer worth stocking which is evidenced by a continual drop in their sales. It used to be cliché that a song could get into the charts selling only a few thousand copies, now it is true. Any single with a degree of label or fan support now has to go top five and desirably to number one. The rest of the charts almost don’t matter anyway, especially with the demise of weekly music TV shows in the UK. We used to talk about the top 30, or for those of us rooting for up and coming niche artists, the top 75. Those days are long gone.

At the same time when downloading came along it offered the opportunity to purchase songs individually not in their original album context. For lots of music this is a good idea, as dance, R&B and pure pop aren’t really album based forms of music. Their albums are the hits with lots of average padding that rarely ever gets heard. But of course this isn’t true of all music. Rock music has a long history of albums with a concept or cohesion to them, with songs that genuinely sound better when heard together. Part of the musical memory we develop, is the feeling of moving between songs on albums, the sequencing and flow of pace and mood offering more than the individual tracks can.

The media as we all know are a fickle bunch, championing something one minute and ridiculing it the next (what we call ‘the NME approach to music reviewing’). So they jumped on the bandwagon when the individual downloading of songs came along and proclaimed ‘the death of the album?’. Although we can all benefit from a less restrictive approach to music bundling, they were ignoring the benefits of the album as a way of retailing music.

Albums are a wonderful way of experiencing ‘just enough’ of an artist in one sitting. As a form it is able to explore the band’s sense of purpose, musical diversity and depth of talent. It’s not that hard through luck or copying others to come up with a good song, it’s harder to make an album that lasts. Record companies of course got defensive about the album but really only had themselves to blame. They constantly over-hyper mediocre talent, the next pseudo-indie band following in the trails of Coldplay / Keene / Snow Patrol with a so called ‘amazing’ album that turns out to have two good songs and lots of filler. They don’t realise they make music fans more cynical. Such marketing may work with teenagers but by their mid-twenties the average person has now through legitimate or otherwise sources, heard tens of thousands of songs.

Artists also are not the best judge of what to release, they can easily fill the entire eighty minute length of a CD and the label will then put it out thinking they are giving their customers value. But they are not because of two key factors. The first is that most artists aren’t talented enough to fill eighty minutes of time with consistently high quality music. The second factor is that the music fan is almost certainly unable to experience the music in one sitting for that long and retain concentration. So they cherry pick from the album, end up with the big hits once again and the accusation that the album is washed up as a medium comes to the fore again.

Like everyone else I went through a phase of listening to thousands of songs on my music player, with it on random play and discovering long lost gems from albums I had barely given attention to. However I also gained a fondness for the skip button as you correspondingly discover lots of average dross. You can delete those, but then you’re gradually creating just a hits filled jukebox playing choices you already know. Hearing the same tracks continually repeating however good they are will inevitably create familiarity-fatigue in many listeners. So you have to find a way to keep exploring new music. A good way is when you discover a great track on random play to go back to its original album (assuming it has one). A good album will then stand up on its own merits and draw you back to it.


Of course we have an interest in this being a download music provider; although by most standards ours has a different approach to many. One of the areas of constant consideration is whether we should offer tracks individually or as albums. Readers might imagine we get a constant range of emails asking us to retail the tracks individually, but we don’t. In nearly two years of running the service we have had three emails, just three. Now consider that we get dozens of emails a day and this is a tiny percentage. This doesn’t surprise us as we work with a music that is primarily album based. Since folk music was established during the 1950s it has always been about a ‘collection of songs’ heard in one place. From Shirley Collins’ early ‘Sweet Primeroses’, The Watersons ‘Frost and Fire’, Bert Jansch’s early albums, John Fahey’s ‘The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death’ and many more, the recorded form of folk and related music was the 78 then the LP in an album format.

The roots of folk are in the dance and song collecting that field researchers undertook in the late 1800s/early 1900s. They bought these collections together in books and the album was a natural extension to this. When we consider classic moments in recorded folk music, they are typically albums as a whole, Fairport Conventions ‘Leige and Leif’, Steve Ashley’s ‘Stroll On’ and of course hundreds more. The songs of course are wonderful in their own right, but they work best as part of the album.

So when we started our service and gave consideration to distributing songs or albums, because of the music we distribute, the album / EP format seemed a natural way to go. Only those three emails have ever questioned this approach and it’s one that differentiates us from other services. We genuinely believe in the album as a format when it is done well, many of those we distribute just wouldn’t be the same individually. Listening for example to Peter Krengel’s beautiful album at our service, it makes sense as a complete work. There is a sense of his exploring aspects of his experience and life that concludes with the end of the album.

Supporting the album in this way allows us to present them sympathetically by offering audio samples that show the diversity and styles included on the album. We can write about the work as a whole which helps give shape to our reviews. It also helps us offer a manageable selection of works that people can navigate. I long ago gave up casually browsing around iTunes and others as a way of discovering new music because they are too overwhelming. Ultimately those services can’t help but draw you back towards the hits, the easy choices. I read recently that a very high majority of music sold at the big services is artists or releases people already know about. I’m delighted to say that the opposite is true at our service. You might start with someone you know but soon our customers seem to be following the categories, links, recommendations and using the jukebox to discover new music.

To truly support and promote music in a way that will give a return back to the artist, it is about more than retailing. If it was a triumph only of marketing then the high street wouldn’t be suffering and generally the growth of downloading slowing down for many services (though not for us). Understanding the music and presenting it in a way that meets with the way in which music fans explore, is important. We can hopefully get this right because the heart of our service is music fans themselves, we are fans still out there buying music, seeking out new artists and thrilled by the unique experience music offers over other forms of entertainment.

If music is becoming a more casual experience, it’s because those who present music are focussed only on convenience rather than what music itself offers. We continue to grow in the same way that niche music retailers continue to thrive. We’re not a hits factory or a ‘stack them high’ music supermarket. We’re like that wonderful record shop you used to visit where you discovered so much great music over the years. It may have been tucked away in an alley, a bit eccentric or even shabby. But you kept going back and left with arms full of music you never knew existed that went on to enrich your life.

The discussion comes down really to one aspect, how much does the retailer care about the music? If it is your passion, then find those who share it. There’s a place for the high street whether it’s in our towns or on the internet, but they don’t nurture music, they have to be driven by a far more stark commercial imperative. Fopp was the last stand in the high street, it was music and value before commerce and it failed. HMV have just bought the name and some shops, you can see why as it offers another route and approach. But their drivers are different to Fopp which will now become a budget outlet for HMV. Every week independent music shops close, many towns or even cities now only have an ever smaller range of high street music chains with most music sold at supermarkets and Woolworths.

That is a sign of a market where the item itself has no value and price is the only competitive differentiator. These outlets will sell only the high selling music that makes them profit, the concept of albums sitting on a shelf, a little dusty but available for you to discover is not part of their business model. This revolution in distribution ups the stakes for the music labels themselves, breaking an act and getting them to number one isn’t success any more, it’s the absolute minimum requirement. Even EMI have been sold to a private equity firm now who understandably are more focussed on profit than supporting music and it is sadly EMI’s own fault. The industry has forgotten about growing in the long term and is about instant profit gratification. The phrase ‘you reap what you sow’ is as true as ever.

Customers have a limited wallet and lots of forms of entertainment to seduce them; they will only buy so much music. With young people exploring back-catalogues they are no longer buying new artists exclusively, who wants a third generation rip off of the original when you can get the classic original for only a few quid? We live in a ‘post fashion’ world, where the barriers of taste and generation gap are down. The Who can top Glastonbury and sound more vital in their sixties than many drab indie bands on the bill.

The mass market will continue to see margins eroded so will chase the tail of success ever harder. It’s a self-reinforcing indication of a shrinking market. But people still want music; they seek experience that gives them something to measure or bookmark their lives with. It needs a completely different way of offering that music to them. Music is more than a commodity but those promoting it need to adapt to this new paradigm, to make connections with artists and fans that enable them to continue and grow.

Otherwise the contribution music makes to us will be diminished as the range of new music available shrinks and we live off memories of past hits.

Making a trail of stones

Since we launched Woven Wheat Whispers we have taken a cautious approach to advertising. It would have been easy to start shouting about what we do, promote it extensively and advertise everywhere. This might have given us some short term attention but it wouldn't have been deserved. We want instead to build gradually and organically at a natural pace. Our biggest advert is word-of-mouth, people thankfully do tell others about the experience they have with us and bring new people towards the service. Even artists get in touch saying they have been recommended to come to our service by the customers.

Because we are attempting to build a service that sustains for a long time, we want people to feel they can trust us. As described in previous posts we feel that a lot of internet music services are becoming too functional and we have tried to create a sense of mystery about our service. From the name, concept and design we are different. It's also why we have related community sites under the Folkspace hub site, so that we're not primarily about commerce, but about supporting the folk community. We want this music community to have a sense of self-discovery about the service, to find us themselves and make a connection you can't at Amazon or iTunes.

That's not to critisize those two excellent services but in the future music industry there is room for niche, tailored services such as ours and international, global supermarkets so long as they are sufficiently different. It's the high street that gets squeezed by these two niche/global models. So to sustain we need to have a different approach, one that gives people a reason to come to our service and stay with it. Ultimately we're both retailing music but the approach and ethos can differentiate us. You don't need a connection with iTunes, Amazon (or Tesco, Asda etc) but companies such as Rough Trade or Woven Wheat Whispers seek to nurture this sense of belonging and communal ownership.

To build those connections takes time and there aren't any short-cuts. It requires services such as ours to build slowly and to place 'signposts' around that people can them use to discover us. These signposts are adverts that aren't too flashy and are placed in many different places over an extended period of time. So in early 2006 we started advertising in folk club leaflets then in small folk festival programmes. In early 2007 we advertised in such as Record Collector and now we have prominent adverts in The Wire magazine (a folk special issue so it makes sense) and in the forthcoming Whitby Folk Week programme.

Over nearly two years we have gradually grown the placement of our advertising but it's still not shown in lots of magazines every month. People ignore adverts they see all the time, we want there to be a sense of enquiry about out adverts, a wonder at what we're trying to do. We want people to see our adverts in various places and it to become an almost subconscious little concept, Woven Wheat Whispers. Anyone who saw Dr Who in recent series with the 'Bad Wolf' placement around the universe will immediately get what we're doing. In fact in finding a link for those who didn't see this, we found this link which explains what they did and the layers that weren't immediately apparent. (it was odd they were doing this at the same time as us).

So we will continue place our adverts in a gradual way, using it as a way to build interest rather than as an outright marketing tool. It's about generating that sense of self-discovery and word of mouth. If people make that connection, they are hopefully more likely to stay with us. We encourage our music community of writers, musicians and customers to all get involved. To spread the word in their sites, blogs, shows, magazines and other routes. Each one of us is the most valuable marketing route there is.

Blog of the Black Seal

Last week I was travelling through the Gloucestershire countryside on a train listening Sigur Rós, the band from Iceland who make beautiful music like no other artist. Iceland is a country of deeply held tradition and norse pagan belief. In their early days the band used to say they actually saw the little people still living hidden in the land there. As I listened to their music, you could hear this mystery in their songs as I looked outside at the rolling hills and forests.

This caused my thoughts to turn towards Arthur Machen, the author of the late 19th / early 20th century, a member of the Golden Dawn (although essentially a Christian mystic). He wrote books that evoked a sense of realms and the hidden supernatural once we look past the conventions of our society. A topic he returned to many times in stories such as 'Novel of the Black Seal' was the feral, lost little people of Britain who exist in the forests and hills away from humans. These were people whose signs were left in the land, the folklore images of stone piles, spirals and rock carvings all signs that a person could follow if they dared. These people were in-human, not part of our race, more ancient and malevolent than us.

As I drifted along I was then taken back to memories of The Waterboys song 'The Stolen Child', for me the best thing they have ever done and highly untypical of their music. It's the last track on their 'folk' album 'Fisherman's Blues' from 1988. This was not so much a song, but a story of a child taken by the fairy folk and was an adaptation of the W.B. Yeats poem of the same name. On the album it is narrated in a broad Irish accent giving it a feeling similar to Richard Burton's evocation of the past in his readings of Under Milkwood.

It was then I thought about the book I was reading, 'Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits' by E. Wilby. This explores those people in society up the 18th century who did charms, folk magic, spells, herbal medicine and were ultimately cast as witches and condemned. One of the essential aspects of their belief was in the fairy folk and fairy kings/queens who lived inside hills and would promise them power in return for their allegiance. This was one of the key accusations again them with the fairy folk being converted by the authorities into the devil. The concept of fairies, however dark was not enough to condemn them outright so the authorities had to make their familiars satanic to arouse the popular sentiment against them (sadly the accusations were often from their neighbours and people of their own community).

It's clear that such concepts as 'the little people', be they a benevolent aspect of children's stories or the more feral, malicious creatives of Machen and the Cunning Folk continue to resonate down the centuries. We may think of ourselves as sophisticated, of having moved beyond such concepts. But these creatures stem from our imagination and fear about our environment. We cannot control it and the unknown is but a step away. Leave the well trodden path and look deeper into the countryside, the places we don't go and who knows what ultimately is still there?

Then I got to my hotel and put on the Jukebox at Woven Wheat Whispers.... what do you think was the first track? 'The Fairy Queen' from the 'Yellowbellies 2' album.....

Where did the typewriters go?

At present iTunes dominates the music download market retaining this precarious position may prove difficult. There is a strong case to be made for all customers having instant access to music from one source. But should this be from a company retailing hardware that ties the service into their products? If this was Microsoft, wouldn't the market be screaming it was unfair? Microsoft have an image as 'corporate bad boy' whilst Apple maintain an easy going, consumer centred reputation. There are irritating aspects too - needing to donwload iTunes, the confused situation over use of Digital Rights Management, the inflexible pricing structures. However in considering this we need to acknowledge that Apple pioneered a service that attracted customers and music distributors to it - it got it right. However success on such a huge scale means that while they offer market access to small, independent labels and musicians, people don't know to look for them. People are drawn towards the big artsts they know or are recommended. Such choice also becomes overwhelming to the user and becomes potentially distracting.

As setting up download services goes from mysterious art to standardised service, the barriers to the major labels setting up their own services become smaller. They will be tempted to take control themselves and offer a competitor service that doesn't need iTunes. Maybe then iTunes will evolve to become a portal that gives integrated access to other players, but I doubt it. There are only a few major labels in the world now who with a variety of subsidiary labels (that often appear to be independent) hold a large part of the market in their artists. Universal alone accounts for a third of all music sold in the USA. With only three companeis making the shift to set up their own services or collaborate away from Apple, it could empower them and prove disastrous for iTunes.

Even this will only easily service the mainstream. Smaller, genre based artists need to hedge their bets by working with as many sources as possible. They also need to find partners that understand their audience and nurture their music. While there are examples of artists making the break through Myspace, this is largely a myth at present. Music companies spend a lot of time researching and they don't just discover artists by accident. The costs of launching an artist globally are too much for this to be a haphazard process. The traditional routes into record labels of demo tapes / CD is almost entirely dead now. The return for the effort involved is too low, especially now that making and recording music is available to everyone. It's management, agencies, marketing and followings that get an artist signed not just talent. So if the big record labels aren't interested in niche music there are still wonderful smaller labels that are.

Gradually it seems the music industry is developing into stratas, big / small, mainstream / niche, major label / independent. The customer should be oblivious to this, we need to make it easier to experience music not harder. Music is a more casual experience for a generation who have many other media to enjoy as well. It may look today like we have a stable download music market, dominated by iTunes, followed by Napster, Wippit etc. But actually the number of downloading organisations at the top end (iTune clones) is falling and companies like HMV struggling to adapt. Services like ours are taking the bottom end and working our way up gradually. There might not be room for a middle-tier anymore who can't adequately service anyone. Even the seemingly unassaible iTunes aren't secure over the next ten years. People are fickle, fashions change and money moves. These things are certain.

Starting small and growing collaboratively with artists and music fans, building a community not just a retail service, establishing a shared musical ethos, these are the roots that ensure we will be around when others disappear. Because ultimately they aren't based on anything other than ease of access and catalogue range. That won't be enough in future. If anything distributing the music will become more or less irrelevant, it will become ever easier for the customers. Eventually there might be one global database of music that everyone can tap into. But how will they know what to buy and why will they bother? That's why we have a different approach. We're about the music itself, we are as much the consumers as we are distributors. The only thing we should all take for granted is that it will not be like it is now. Remember typewriters?

Don't use the F-word...

The word 'folk' is used so variously in reviewing music that it has effectively become meaningless. It is really written as short hand for song using an acoustic guitar by the popular press. But surely that's about instrumentation rather than a style? Popular music is built upon the acoustic guitar - it was the means of production in the hands of the populace for the first time. Until the mid-1950s there wasn't even a music style called 'folk'.

It was coined to describe traditional songs performed in a more modern setting. Pioneered by such as Pete & Peggy Seegar and Ewan McColl adopting the country/blues of such as Hank Williams or Big Bill Broonzy. They were advocates of the traditional songs being carried forward but even they started to write their own songs. The traditional singers like Harry Cox saw folk as 'pop music', sincere young artists like Shirley Collins seeming to them to be as close to chart songs as their music. Now of course we think of Shirley as one of most important traditional artists. Maybe perceptions change with time and distance.

Part of the problem is that folk isn't a 'music' as such although it has come to be regarded as one. It originates from when there was a clear delineation between the upper classes of Britain and the 'working classes', the folk who made up the population. The upper classes had their high art such as classical music, opera, ballet whereas the wider population could be dismissed with the all encompassing word 'folk'. Even then the songs of the working people at the turn of the century (the 19th into 20th) would encompass traditional songs, music hall, novelty songs, songs of work, family songs, communal choruses and hymns. It wasn't one music as such, it was a collection of songs transmitted through each generation.

If it refers to a population who played, sang and listened to the music then it also refers to the way in which the music was passed on. Being mostly unwritten and part of the aural tradition of passing through the generations, the word folk refers to the method of transmission. Before there was a media, it was passed around amongst the population directly in the home, festivals, work places, pubs and music halls.

There is also the aspect of subject matter too, as folk is related to folklore. The lore of the people, the legends, stories, myths and informal poetry of the people formed into song. So we have a music of the people, transmitted amongst them talking about their experiences. These are the ways Bob Pegg (of Mr Fox, solo and author) considers the music in his groundbreaking book and Bob Trubshaw looks at the emergence of folklore. Perhaps we can apply this to the music after all in the modern era.

We don't have the patronising tone of the 'low arts' any more, but there's clearly an amateur craft at work, a directness and simplicity to the form that is different to the lush, processed pop of the day. It's also not a music that has ever been controlled by the major record labels. The internet really has liberated musicians to make and distribute their own music once again. In a direct music such as 'folk' that doesn't need huge productions or fifty layers, the sound is perfectly fine recorded at home. It's about feel and communication not sophistication.

It's the third item that for us makes something folk or not. A set of love songs played acoustically may be nice but they aren't really folk. They don't tell us anything about our shared past, communal experience or the stories of our lives. It may not matter, lots of music sounds like folk but isn't quite. It doesn't worry me although it frustrates many traditionalists. The charts are full of soppy boys with acoustic guitars who clearly aren't folk. Ultimately then it comes down to intent - are you consciously trying to communicate something more than just personal emotions about the condition of the people. If so, that's as good an approach as any.

The instrumentation of traditional music was never guitars anyway, it was reed organs, melodeons, concertinas, whistles, fiddles, hand drums. Maybe we should let go of this word folk, but then there has to be a music that stands for something, that never recedes to blandness, a music that cannot be bought and endures beyond the writer. We will never really get to terms with the word and over time more layers of confusion will be added. But it's worth holding to, because if nothing else, it's a music that can't be categorised, that stands outside the mainstream, that is connected with the people, that expresses their condition in a more compelling way than politics can, that stirs them to action and carries the lesson down the decades.

So let's not apologise or worry about if you are or aren't folk. If you want to be, then surely you are because consciously you are trying to communicate amongst the people something that matters to us all.

Say it loud, I'm folk and I'm proud.

Why will we go into cities?

Going to a shop in the city and buying CDs used to feel convenient, now when we can order music online and know it is in stock, that has changed. In an era of internet commerce and now downloads, the general stockist of CDs feels doomed. The supermarkets and petrol stations take the casual listener who wants the chart sounds at a discounted price or at a convenient purchase location. The specialist online stockists service those with a strong genre interest more effectively than a general music chain ever can. The concept of the big music store with thousands of CDs is increasingly redundant. We seem to be at a tipping point where in a few short years it will become uneconomic to do so. Already the independent chains are disappearing, the third biggest chain of stores in the UK 'Fopp' this week announced its closure. HMV one of the UK's biggest is struggling and claims the pace of change in purchasing patterns is faster than they or anyone else anticipated.

The truth is that once downloading, online CD shops and the like started there wasn't any way back for shops. The big music retail chains around the world are being attacked on all sides, they can't possibly hope to stock everything - but that's what online means, they are too slow to meet the challenge of those who built their businesses online, they try to reinvent the shops when it's the shops that are the problem. We all used to meet in music shops and spend hours browsing, now we can do it at home. Going into a shop seems inconvenient, old fashioned and too slow these days.

Thankfully the book retail chains realised this, they made the experience itself better in a shop so browsing became not a chore but a luxury. With coffee to hand, calming music, wooden floors and staff who want to help, buying books has gone upmarket as a way to compete. It's still an industry that needs to shrink but it's at least recognising issue. The answer of music retailers seems to be to offer downloads in the shop - but why would we ever bother to do that? It's counter-intuitive and the customer knows it.

An essential problem is now being highlighted - being a stockist retailer isn't enough. Shops have not added enough value to the experience. They have had token attempts with instore magazines, staff allocated to genres and other ideas. But really they were focussed on shifting the easy product fast which required no contribution from them other than being in the right location and at a competitive price. To sustain a music retail service in the future whether online or off, the service model has to grow so that the customer feels a reason to come back and make a positive choice to use you. This can be exclusive content but that's not enough, as really it's never exclusive for long. Being big too isn't the answer as eventually you lose touch and become confusing to the customer.

We believe it's about being the customer's trusted advisor, their intimate associate who guides them towards not only what they like now, but what they may in future. You have to build something around the music too so that people feel a sense of communing with each other. We need to feel there is an ongoing interaction that we want to be part of.

The concept of a physical highstreet for goods and services more easily and informedly bought over the internet may be in question. Our cities instead of getting bigger may find gaping holes where music shops, book shops, banks, insurers and the like used to be. Maybe the answer won't be bigger cities, but smaller ones in which a sense of community permeates back. Instead of being a retail space, cities might become a place to be together, to associate.

We recognise this now, our service model was designed not just to be a 'retail stockist' of downloads but an adaptive community that forms itself over time based on shared interests. Our society is based on a concept of economic growth but unless this is matched to a reduced use of resources it is an entirely unsustainable model. Learning how to do less, travel less, consume less but appreciate more may be part of how we change over coming years. Because ultimately it's not about how much music you have, it's about what it says to you. For us too, in our service it's not about how much we sell, it's about the value we bring.